Taupo

There photos were taken on a recent trip to Taupo taken in October 2011. I made the foolish mistake of thinking I’d be clever and not bother bringing my camera charger with me, which, coupled with the mistake of thinking I had a fully charged camera when in fact it was half-charged meant I spent the whole trip paranoid about my battery running out. Never again! Always bring your charger!

This first photo was a of the unit we were staying at our semi-fancy resort at night. The light is from an outside tungsten bulb.

60 second exposure, white balance is shade, and took a lot of tries to get the manual exposure and framing right – low light subjects don’t show up on LCD’s. Must have been lying on the ground setting this up for about 15 minutes.

Next photo is taken at the “craters of the moon” which is a bunch of hotpools.

I love this shot! It’s a classic tourism brochure shot with the path creating a nice fat windy line that goes off into the distance, but what really makes this shot is my lovely girlfriend Kat whose wearing a bright pink dress that looks so completely out of place in this landscape.

Speaking of lines, I got some since ones, and some nice colours, by the Huka Falls.

Also shot some video on this trip with my digicam which is a first for me

I was taking some photos back our unit at sunset and my battery meter was screaming “about to die! about to die!”. The VERY last shot I took was a sweet one, I didn’t know until I got home or not if this shot even saved, I was stoked when I realised that it had.

To get the sunburst nice and big, I used and apeture of f/8, which is as high as my LX3 goes. Higher apeture number means bigger sunbursts.

Also on this trip I worked out how to use my hopelessly bad cellphone camera which is a 3MP (might as well be 1MP) fuzzcam on a Huawei Ideos 8150 (a bottom end smartphone). The colour rendition on this thing is abysmal so the trick is to use it in black and white mode. Oh and do all the usual photographic things like look for nice light and elegant forms 🙂

As Ken Rockwell is likes to point out, your camera doesn’t matter. So, so true. I got what was probably the two best photos of the trip from my utterly rubbish cellphone camera.

This one is of an airplane cafe in the middle of nowhere’s ville.

The next pic is in Levin where I started taking photos while waiting for Kat to buy some fabric. I’m not clever enough to say why this photo seems to work so well.